From Sketch to Still

*In a recurring series,*Vanity Fair *pulls back the curtain on awards season’s most visually enticing films, revealing exclusive details of the creative process of art directors, costume designers, makeup artists, cinematographers, and more. This week, Peter Swords King—nominated this year for his second Oscar—discusses his makeup and hair design for Peter Jackson’s* The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Makeup-and-hair designer Peter Swords King won an Oscar in 2003 for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, but he says his Oscar-nominated work (along with Tami Lane and Rick Findlater) for The Hobbit proved to be a greater challenge. Nearly every actor in the film wears a prosthetic and wig. In this film still, Bilbo meets the dwarves.

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Not many women would relish the chance to play an ever-younger version of a character 12 years after the original role, but Cate Blanchett didn’t sweat it. “Cate is very good about looking after her skin,” says King. “She doesn’t make a big fuss about it, but she puts on a lot of stuff at night when she’s asleep.”

Photo: By Todd Eyre.

To make Blanchett’s ethereal elfin queen Galadriel appear extra-luminous, King mixed a special light-reflective powder. (The real question: will he sell it to us?!) Galadriel wears the same wig as in *The Lord of the Rings.*The actress filmed for two weeks, and by the third day, King says, she fell asleep in her makeup chair during application. Since King had multiple makeup trailers (nine at minimum), he transformed hers into an elfin glade.

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

There’s a 60-year gap between The Hobbitand The Lord of the Rings, but since that’s a drop in the bucket in the life of a wizard, the team essentially left Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellen) looking the same as he did in The Lord of the Rings. “Gandalf is Gandalf. If you change him too much, everyone will be up in arms,” King says. Here, makeup-and-hair supervisor Rick Findlater grooms the elder wizard.

Photo: By Todd Eyre.

Lane and King blend the prosthetic skin into his hairline, and hand-paint broken blood vessels and a ruddy coloring onto his face. His wig and beard are made of yak hair.

Photo: By Mark Pokorny.

Since designing Gimli, the lone dwarf in *The Lord of the Rings,*King says, “the materials have changed for the better. Now we’re using encapsulated silica. When you take it off the stand, it’s actually like having a piece of skin in your hand. It’s quite strange! What’s fantastic about it is how incredibly thin it is. The edges blend away completely, and the product will mimic the muscles underneath the skin to a certain extent. When someone frowns, the prosthetic will frown. It’s fantastic for our characters.” As seen here, the dwarf can even wrinkle his prosthetic nose.

Photo: By Mark Pokorny.

The dwarves’ heavy beards weighed several pounds and had to be strapped to their bald caps. Many of the characters have intricately braided hair. Not only is this a reference to Gimli, the dwarf in The Lord of the Rings, but it’s also practical. Otherwise, “think of all that long hair flying around in battle!” says King

Photo: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Makeup-and-hair designer Peter Swords King won an Oscar in 2003 for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, but he says his Oscar-nominated work (along with Tami Lane and Rick Findlater) for The Hobbit proved to be a greater challenge. Nearly every actor in the film wears a prosthetic and wig. In this film still, Bilbo meets the dwarves.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Not many women would relish the chance to play an ever-younger version of a character 12 years after the original role, but Cate Blanchett didn’t sweat it. “Cate is very good about looking after her skin,” says King. “She doesn’t make a big fuss about it, but she puts on a lot of stuff at night when she’s asleep.”

By Todd Eyre.

To make Blanchett’s ethereal elfin queen Galadriel appear extra-luminous, King mixed a special light-reflective powder. (The real question: will he sell it to us?!) Galadriel wears the same wig as in *The Lord of the Rings.*The actress filmed for two weeks, and by the third day, King says, she fell asleep in her makeup chair during application. Since King had multiple makeup trailers (nine at minimum), he transformed hers into an elfin glade.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

There’s a 60-year gap between The Hobbitand The Lord of the Rings, but since that’s a drop in the bucket in the life of a wizard, the team essentially left Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellen) looking the same as he did in The Lord of the Rings. “Gandalf is Gandalf. If you change him too much, everyone will be up in arms,” King says. Here, makeup-and-hair supervisor Rick Findlater grooms the elder wizard.

By Todd Eyre.

To create the impression of a slightly younger wizard, Gandalf’s beard was darkened and a bit more color was added to his face.

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

Prosthetics supervisor Tami Lane and King transform a pleasant enough actor into a fearsome dwarf. The process takes an hour and a half.

By Mark Pokorny (4).

Lane and King blend the prosthetic skin into his hairline, and hand-paint broken blood vessels and a ruddy coloring onto his face. His wig and beard are made of yak hair.

By Mark Pokorny.

Since designing Gimli, the lone dwarf in *The Lord of the Rings,*King says, “the materials have changed for the better. Now we’re using encapsulated silica. When you take it off the stand, it’s actually like having a piece of skin in your hand. It’s quite strange! What’s fantastic about it is how incredibly thin it is. The edges blend away completely, and the product will mimic the muscles underneath the skin to a certain extent. When someone frowns, the prosthetic will frown. It’s fantastic for our characters.” As seen here, the dwarf can even wrinkle his prosthetic nose.

By Mark Pokorny.

The dwarves’ heavy beards weighed several pounds and had to be strapped to their bald caps. Many of the characters have intricately braided hair. Not only is this a reference to Gimli, the dwarf in The Lord of the Rings, but it’s also practical. Otherwise, “think of all that long hair flying around in battle!” says King

Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.

If hair-and-makeup artist Peter Swords King takes the win on Oscar night, he’ll have an unusual source to thank—yaks. Himalayan bovines were sheared to help create the shaggy beards and untamed locks of the remarkable-looking dwarves in The Hobbit.

And apparently it took quite a lot of hair: “I can’t tell you how many wigs we had. There’s no one in the film without a wig!” King recently recounted, before doubling back to recall a single extra whose hair was feral enough to pass as a woodland dweller. “For each dwarf character, we made six wigs and eight beards. Each character had a scale double, a stunt double, a scale stunt double, a riding double, and a photo double.”

On other sets, these doubles would have worn synthetic versions of the actor’s wig, but given the incredible clarity of 3D imagery, King insisted on real yak wigs for every version of each dwarf. “It’s like working under a magnifying glass,” he says. “Everything is in focus. You can see every pore, whether it’s the actor’s real pores on the skin or that of the prosthetics.” The scale of the project heightened the challenge. “In The Lord of the Rings we only had one dwarf. This time, we have 13 dwarves."

To create a fully realized look for each character, director Peter Jackson met with conceptual artists to sketch hundreds of reference images. (While the Jackson camp keeps these images under wraps, they tell us that some will be released in books about the film.) From the start, the depictions diverged from Tolkien’s text: the novelist described the dwarves’ colorful (blue, yellow, white) beards and vibrant cloaks, but the filmmakers decided those choices would be too distracting. They based the dwarves’ looks on their imagined personalities, but the book paints these characters in broad strokes, so the filmmakers had to fill in details. Jackson also considered their ancestry, like in the case of Gimli, who appears in The Lord of the Rings with red hair. Duly, his father, Gloin, has red hair in The Hobbit. While this may seem obsessive, the filmmakers’ devotion is only equal to that of the franchise’s fans. (One has even gone so far as to create a census of Middle Earth.)

The dwarves’ look is also influenced by their lifestyle. “They drink a lot—their manners are really bad at the table. Any person who’s drunk all their lives, their nose is going to get quite red. All they do is eat meat. It’s not a very good diet. They live outside, so they’re beaten, battered, and bruised,” says King.

Once the sketches were perfected, the filmmakers began casting. At this point, the hair-and-makeup team fit the actors for wigs, as well as prosthetics.

“Then we’d have what we called show and tell,” King says. “Every head of department would be there, and we’d change everything. We’d say, Let’s make his beard longer. Let’s make it shorter. We don’t like the color. Let’s make it lighter. Let’s make it darker. We went through this process with every dwarf, every time a dwarf changes his costume.”

King estimates that each dwarf received 20 to 30 show-and-tell sessions. Details, such as broken blood vessels, were added to the prosthetic skin, and the hair and beards were refined to help imply their Lilliputian stature. “When we refer to a normal-size person with a padded suit on and big clothes, big hair, a big beard, a small face, and seemingly no neck, visually you’re making them go wide. It helped us get the scale right,” King says. (The massive padding and weighty hairpieces, he concedes, made for an exceptionally sweaty set.)

The dwarf leader, Thorin, proved to be the toughest character to nail. In the end, King’s team (from which prosthetics supervisor Tami Lane and key makeup-and-hair supervisor Rick Findlater share the Oscar nomination) decided to forgo yak hair in favor of human hair to make Thorin stand out from the tribe. While it’s fun to see how incredibly different the dwarves look from the actors who play them, it wasn’t as much of a stretch for some. Take Martin Freeman’s Bilbo. “How can I say this politely?” says King. “Martin already has a sort of Hobbit-y face. He’s got ears on; he’s got a wig on. We tried him with a slightly bigger nose, but we didn’t like that.”

Prosthetics came in handy, however, in scenes in which Old Bilbo (Ian Holm) had to be on location. Since Holm could not travel to New Zealand, he filmed much of his role against a green screen at Pinewood Studios. For the shots that couldn’t be fudged, Freeman donned prosthetics and filled in.

On top of the principals, King designed makeup and hair for hundreds of extras, and thankfully, he says, the Kiwis were game. He was delighted to find even glamorous women lining up to be transformed into goblins. “They’d come in and say, ‘I don’t care what you do to me!’ You don’t really see it in the scene, but when all of the women are running out, all of the women have beards.” At times, life in New Zealand imitated Middle Earth: “The people that come in to play the dwarves are hairy and big and bouncy, and the guys that come in to play the elves are kind of not there.”

In the end, King says, the challenge was far greater than he’d originally bargained for. “They said, ‘Come back. We’re going to do a lovely little film called The Hobbit.’ Of course, it turned out to be much larger than The Lord of the Rings.”